This new company’s “100x faster, cheaper Wifi” is promising

A startup company called Starry, is attempting to provide a cheaper but 100x faster and hassle-free internet service, and testing is set to begin in Boston.

Starry is promising a great order of fast, affordable wireless internet access to apartments and businesses. When they say fast, they mean it, they say their wireless internet will be nearly 100 times faster than the average home connection.

Provided with advances in microelectronics and software, the high-capacity wireless technology involved millimeter wave active phased array that is now much less expensive and has been streamlined.

Starry is such a way ahead with other companies such as Facebook and Google, even big telecoms like Verizon and Comcast which are also playing with the idea, wherein Starry would make it the first to actually get the technology inside homes and offices.

In Starry’s beta test, testers in Boston will get a gadget containing an antenna unit. It will be placed on an exterior windowsill. The inside portion of the device will have an ethernet jack to connect on Starry Station — the startup’s own Wi-Fi router.

The service will come from a transmitter, which is still being finished by the company, that is a two-foot tall rooftop unit which is able to serve between 600-900 customers within one-kilometer range.

A new wired network for a housing unit and business in an urban setting would cost $2,500 that is charged to customers. Starry can put a unit in a house for as low as $25 per customer and it needs only a couple strands of fiber optic cable connecting to each rooftop transmitter.

The startup remarkably needs only 5 to 10 percent of potential customers to take advantage of the service compared to more than 50 percent required by other competitors just to provide enough payback on capital costs.